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This study analyzes the novel Ghostwritten by David Mitchell through the lens of trauma theory, a relatively new approach to literary analysis. Ghostwritten has been studied from a variety of perspectives, including postmodernism and globalization, but trauma theory has not yet been applied. The purpose of this study is to examine how the novel depicts trauma’s effects on individuals. Utilizing Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, this study focuses on three central concepts: “delayed and unconscious responses”. The analysis indicates that the novel depicts trauma as an experience that defies representation and comprehension, with inadequate language conveying the full extent of such experiences. In addition, the novel emphasizes the paradox of testimony, in which trauma survivors are urged to speak about their experiences but find it difficult to do so in a meaningful and coherent manner. Thus, the findings of this study contribute to the ongoing dialogue about trauma and its depiction in literature.

Inspired by ethical literary criticism, this article1 attempts to bring to critical attention the ethical dimensions of Mitchell's war writing in Black Swan Green. By analyzing the way in which Jason's brain text in relation to war formulates and develops, this article tries to throw light on Mitchell's strategy of approaching and reconsidering the causes and consequences of war from the perspective of a teenager. It is argued that Mitchell has exploited diverse expressive resources--the art of the fragmentary, for example--to break new ground for rethinking the wars that fade into history. Instead of portraying violent scenes where bloody battles occur, Mitchell directs readerly attention to the emotional and ethical responses provoked in an individual that remains far away from the battlefield. In this sense, the pyrotechnic storytelling in Black Swan Green bears witness to Mitchell's ongoing efforts to introduce fresh perspectives with which to rethink war and peace and gives full expression to the ethical cosmopolitanism that he expects contemporary readership to embrace in the era of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of Absent Rebels. Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction by Annika Gonnermann.

This article argues that David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) represents a new variation of the genre of historical fiction. The historical novel in Britain has risen to prominence since the 1980s and in the twenty-first century this strong interest in the past continues. Placing David Mitchell’s book in the context of recent historical fiction, the article takes account of Joseph Brooker’s hypothesis that, together with Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet may be indicative of an emergent trend in the contemporary English historical novel. The purpose of the article is to identify and explore Mitchell’s key strategies of writing about history. It is argued that, departing from the prevalent mode of historiographic metafiction, Mitchell’s book adheres to some of the traditional tenets of the genre while achieving the Scottian aim of animating the past in innovative ways. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the use of the present tense, the subjective perspectives, and the exclusion of foreknowledge lend the novel dramatic qualities.

David Mitchell has written a famous novel about how to make a (geographically fragmented) novel out of fragments: the six life stories included in Cloud Atlas are implicit fictional networks, simultaneously concealed and laid bare. The novel offers ample room for six nested histories and their divergent styles; the result is a strange and rather ostentatious book, shaped like a ziggurat, and providing an almost didactic initiation into matters of style. In fact, David Mitchell offers an atlas of the globalization of fiction. The spaces and times of Cloud Atlas engender not only polytopy and polychrony, but also a theory of fiction. The atlas of worlds, zones, territories, topographies becomes a structure that constantly generates other worlds to be visited or narrated. Their very narrativity allows for the globalization of fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimetic etymological accuracy. Specifically, I show that of the 13,246 words in Part I of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, there are at least three terms that have an etymological first-usage date from after 1910: spillage, variously attested from ~1934; latino, from ~1946; and lazy-eye, from ~1960. Instead, I show that racist and colonial terms occur with much greater frequency in Cloud Atlas than in a broader contemporary textual corpus (the Oxford English Corpus), indicating that the construction of imagined historical style likely rests more on infrequent word use and thematic terms from outmoded racist discourses than on etymological mimesis.

Rose Harris-Birtill introduces the David Mitchell special edition of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings. Harris-Birtill provides a critical introduction to David Mitchell’s complete works, before discussing her experiences as organiser of the international David Mitchell Conference 2017, held at the University of St Andrews on 3rd June 2017, and its relationship to the special edition. Highlighting the dominance of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas in both Mitchell’s UK book sales and across current literary criticism to date, Harris-Birtill introduces the articles in the special edition, summarising the contributions of each essay. Drawing on the conference discussion, and the decision to include the author in the event, Harris-Birtill argues for the importance of openly discussing the scholarly issues and rewards of working with living authors in the field of contemporary literature.

This work includes two texts on the themes of gardens and slow time presented in a reading with David Mitchell at the University of St Andrews 2017 conference on Mitchell. These works of ‘truthful fiction’ extend from an ongoing project, The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin. Written in dialogue with The Bone Clocks and featuring a collaboration with Mitchell, they explore the Cretan labyrinth as a cultural and topological motif and recount Jardin’s designing a garden with a meditative labyrinth. The afterword situates the texts in a broader context of bringing the ‘slow’ movement to academic institutions and teaching Mitchell’s work in connection with contemplative pedagogies.

David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) seemingly echoes the historical struggles of Cloud Atlas (2004) in pitting active ethical agency against cannibalistic rapaciousness. And yet, the trans-universal war between a band of peaceful ‘Horologists’ and predatory ‘soul-decanters’ demonstrates how fantasy fiction offers alternative perspectives not only for socio-cultural models of diversity and difference, but for cosmopolitical power struggles being played out at supranational levels.The Bone Clocks opens up subversive spaces through which to think about threats facing the twenty-first century, from migration and xenophobic nationalism to ecological degradation and planetary destruction. By imagining progressive interrelationships between human and supernatural entities, the novel gestures towards fantasy literature’s unique capacity to extend future discussions of cosmopolitanism in new and innovative directions. While the presence of cosmopolitan theory has received much critical attention in Mitchell’s earlier fiction, this article will suggest that the speculative nature of The Bone Clocks is important in demonstrating the concept’s continuing capacity to serve as a fantastical form of imaginative cultural protestation and social polemic.

The breathless itineraries of David Mitchell’s novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas position them as books offering a globalized perspective. The novels both employ multiple narratives that—through a range of first person narrators, focalizers, and textual forms—proliferate stories encompassing myriad places and moments. The tales in these works intertwine and nest in one another, their formal links paralleled by spiritual bonds between characters: ghosts, reincarnations, and migrating spirits help bridge disparate story lines. These connections mean their individual stories cannot be read in isolation as an accumulation of different global viewpoints but must be seen as embedded within one another. If globalization views the planet as if from afar and stresses equivalence and exchange (especially through international markets), spirit, conceived here as the capability of some matter to transform itself, allows the world to be seen and surveyed from within. Moreover, the transfer of spirit between characters highlights their interconnections, even if these characters never meet. Consequently, these novels construct the concept of ‘world’ as a complex and dynamic phenomenological production, one echoing Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘mondialisation’. In Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, world is thus discovered only through a confrontation with other beings. As this encounter cannot be staged through merely subsuming the other’s viewpoint, it is dependent on spiritual projection, on endeavoring to inhabit the perspective of another. Through this worldly panorama, Mitchell’s novels rework both the traditional association of novel and nation, as well as invocations of the spirit of a nation, so they can present a world that can only be known from inside material and located bodies, through spiritually entwined perspectives and stories.

Digital media have provided new avenues of distribution for serial fiction and created new narrative possibilities for the form, including the widespread use of what Margolin labels "concurrent narration" and Page terms "real-time narration." This form of serial publication, where a story is distributed in installments coterminously with the events being reported, is enabled by the Internet's possibilities for instantaneous transmission, and it appears in narratives on various platforms that rely on the web for content distribution. To discuss this temporal confluence of the narrated, narration, and publication, we analyze the use of concurrent narration in two digitally distributed serialized narratives, David Mitchell's Twitter story "@I_Bombadil" (2015), and the Norwegian webserial Skam (2015–17), both of which were originally transmitted piecemeal in near-concurrence with the narrated events. Furthermore, we analyze the participation surrounding the two stories. Serial fiction has always encouraged the active engagement of its audience, and this tendency becomes especially pronounced when stories are distributed via social media that allow for rapid exchanges between readers. The participatory practices that emerge in the wake of digitalization are often conceived as inherently democratic forms of engagement, but this predominantly positive conception may be questioned, since participation is a complex concept that covers a range of different practices. By analyzing the participation that surrounds "@I_Bombadil" and Skam we nuance the perspective on digitally enabled participatory culture and thus contribute to a better understanding of how new digital forms of distribution affect the modes of narrating and engaging in serialized narratives today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to complement existing media-based approaches to Twitter fiction with a genre-based approach that considers it in the context of the genre and the tradition of the short story. After a brief introductory overview of Twitter fiction, I discuss three Twitter stories, written by established authors: Rick Moody's 'Some Contemporary Characters' (2009), Jennifer Egan's 'Black Box' (2012) and David Mitchell's 'The Right Sort' (2014a). In a close textual analysis of these stories, I trace the impact of the Twitter format on the style, plot, themes and narrative techniques of these short stories. More particularly, I show how each of these works combines poetic and narrative techniques, or what DuPlessis has called 'segmentivity' and 'narrativity', in a different way. Finally, the conclusion considers the characteristics of these Twitter stories in the light of the tradition and the genre of the modern short story more in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the structural and thematic repetitions in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Similar motifs and character types are re-used in the novel's circular rather than linear structure. It is argued that, while staging a dialectic of sameness and difference, Cloud Atlas eschews the Platonic hierarchy of a model and its copy and blurs the distinction between the real and the fictional. All the six interlocked narratives that build the novel may be regarded as artefacts, remediated and encased in other artefacts. The same material is reconfigured in an endless cycle, which, as the article argues, harks back to the second, Nietzschean model of repetition distinguished by J. Hillis Miller in Fiction and Repetition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the paradigmatic example of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, I argue that contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions articulate temporalities critical of Western modernity's apocalyptic understanding of history. The article's first section outlines the history of apocalyptic discourse and fleshes out the connection between postmodern theories of historiography and contemporary post-apocalyptic novels: these invite us to reflect on history qua narrative, while challenging an essentially apocalyptic model of narrative. The second section focuses on Cloud Atlas's concertina-like structure, which resists a telic closure, warps the deterministic linearity of apocalyptic history and of traditional plots, and, through recurring patterns, foregrounds the dystopian implications of apocalypticism. The third section considers these implications in Cloud Atlas--from colonialism to the future neo-colonial biopower of corporations and anthropogenic environmental crises. Finally, I examine how the content and structure of the novel combine to exalt individual agency against the determinism and predatory behavior supported by the apocalyptic metanarrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seven weeks before the release of his novel, Slade House (2015), David Mitchell began tweeting as a character, “Bombadil”, from the forthcoming text. The tweets appeared on an account, @I_Bombadil (2015), set up by Mitchell, with the platform affording the author the opportunity to extend the character’s narrative arc beyond the pages of the print-published novel and into Twitter’s digital environs. For Mitchell, the boundaries separating literary works are never absolute and the process of repeatedly returning to and referencing prior works, methodically expanding and stretching his corpus by thematically and structurally folding each new work into an extant literary universe, is the central characteristic of his literary practice. What was notable in the case of @I_Bombadil and Slade House, however, was that the connections across and between the works were also connections across and between distinct media environments. This article examines the ways in which the temporal-spatial entanglements between @I_Bombadil and Slade House, characteristic of Mitchell’s retrospective and recursive literary practice, were intensified and complicated as they were further tangled up with the temporal−spatial dynamics of digital and print media respectively. By utilising Marshall McLuhan’s media studies, and particularly his concept of the “resonant interval”—the borderline between “acoustic” and “visual” space produced in the dialogue between electronic (digital) and print media—as a means of articulating the dialogic double-space in between @I_Bombadil and Slade House, this article addresses the works as a symbiotic product of both literary technique and materialist media operability, adopting a nuanced, media-oriented perspective that fully engages with the temporal affordances of the Twitter platform as an inextricable aspect of the fundamentally temporal-spatial dynamics of Mitchell’s “resonant” literary practice.

This essay explores the trope of reincarnation across the works of British author David Mitchell (b. 1969) as an alternative approach to linear temporality, whose spiralling cyclicality warns of the dangers of seeing past actions as separate from future consequences, and whose focus on human interconnection demonstrates the importance of collective, intergenerational action in the face of ecological crises. Drawing on the Buddhist philosophy of samsara, or the cycle of life, death and rebirth, this paper identifies links between the author's interest in reincarnation and its secular manifestation in the treatment of time in his fictions. These works draw on reincarnation in their structures and characterization as part of an ethical approach to the Anthropocene, using the temporal model of "reincarnation time" as a narrative strategy to demonstrate that a greater understanding of generational interdependence is urgently needed in order to challenge the linear "end of history" narrative of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas was only published in 2004, critics are already beginning to write articles and book chapters about his novel. Thus far, though, no one has examined the novel's portrayal of identity or authenticity as defined by individual choice and action, though this idea undergirds the entire novel. When most people talk about choice and identity, they refer to Jean-Paul's Sartre's view of Existentialism. Sartre's philosophy works well when examining Mitchell's novel, but using other ideas from Charles Taylor, a more contemporary philosopher, deepens how one reads the ideas about choice, action and identity that Mitchell's novel examines. These six seemingly separate stories explore these ideas of choice, responsibility and identity, as each of the major characters struggles to discover who he or she is and how he or she should live in the various worlds they find themselves in. Looking at the novel through Sartrean Existentialism, along with Charles Taylor's ideas about identity, we can see the major characters in Cloud Atlas all finally make choices that define who they are, choices that provide an identity that carries on beyond their own lives and stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps nowhere in David Mitchell's oeuvre does the collision of genre hierarchies take so radical a turn as in his novel The Bone Clocks (2014), where pulp fictional imagery, themes, and style invade such moments of high seriousness as Iraq war journalism and global environmental collapse. This essay argues that Mitchell's book channels the painfully ecstatic throes of a narrative literally "beside itself" with theorizing, shaping, and embodying: both of new generic form and of a self-reflexive discourse on theory. The cosmic war between "atemporal," memory-redacting "Anchorites," and "Horologists" that ruptures the storylines of Mitchell's novel becomes a way of reexamining the place of meta- and master narratives in the age of their postmodern exile. It also allegorizes a war between theorists, between contesting ways of thinking history, memory, and the archive, yielding important implications for Mitchell's trans-textual "Über-Book" and for the novel as a temporal form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper suggests that the increasing proliferation of network fictions in literature, film, television and the internet may be interpreted through a theoretical framework that reconceptuallises the originally strictly psychoanalytic concept of the 'Unheimlich' (Freud’s idea of the ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’) within the context of political, economic and cultural disources fo globalisation. ‘Network fictions’ are those texts consisting of multiple interlocking narratives set in various times and places that explore the interconnections of characters and events across different storylines: novels such as William Gibson’s 'Pattern Recognition' (2003), Hari Kunzro’s 'Transmission' (2005) and 'Gods Without Men' (2011), David Mitchell’s 'Cloud Atlas' (2004), or Rana Dasgupta’s 'Tokyo Cancelled' (2005) are some examples. My argument is that central to these fictions is a sense of a ‘global unhomely’. The sense of displacement, unhomeliness and global mobility that is conveyed in these fictions is fundamental to the experience of the 'Unheimlich'. In addition, the ability of the concept to convey a combined sense of the familiar and the strange is useful in exploring the ways in which these fictions engage with theoretical debates on globalisation that perceive the interaction between global flows and local cultures either in terms of homogenisation and uniformity or of heterogenisation and hybridity. Moreover, the repetitive temporality of the 'Unheimlich' is another distinctive aspect that allows a reading of the disjunctive, non-linear temporal structure of these fictions from this perspective. The ‘repetition compulsion’, however, that Freud considered to be an example of uncanniness was also theorised by him as a post-traumatic symptom, and this implicit association of uncanniness with post-traumatic experience also allows to interpret the persistent preoccupation of these fictions with suffering and disaster, as well as their explorations of the ways in which collective tragedy and personal trauma reverberate within an increasingly globalised, interconnected world.

Japan has often been portrayed by orientalist stereotypes, as famously framed by Edward Said, that were mainly constituted within Europe and North America. There are two distinct streams of orientalist discourse around Japan: traditional Orientalism and techno-Orientalism. Here the West speaks of the Other/the non-West rather than allowing it to speak for itself. In regards to the discourse of ‘Otherness’, another interesting phenomenon is Japan’s self-Orientalising: through the internalisation of the Western Orientalist discourse, Japan identifies itself and constructs its own subjectivity. In his literary works, the author David Mitchell attempts to subvert the conventional orientalist approach to describe Japan while concurrently maintaining his position as a British observer. He makes use of Western perspectives to cater to his Western readers’ preference for Japan’s traditional and cultural elements, and yet at the same time attempts to subvert stereotypes. Mitchell’s approach is reminiscent of Japanese author Murakami Haruki’s use of both ‘Japaneseness’ and ‘un-Japaneseness’ in his works. Mitchell also learnt the importance of the use of the subjective narrative voice from Murakami. In this article, I examine how David Mitchell, as a western author, attempts to go beyond orientalist stereotypes, and how his writing is influenced by Murakami Haruki.

W meandrach stylu, w labiryncie czasu. Stylizacja w tłumaczeniu Atlasu Chmur Davida Mitchella Autorka tekstu stara się przedstawić, jaki wpływ na przebieg tłumaczenia ma styl. Teoretyczna perspektywa pokazująca rolę stylu w tekście literackim poprzedza analizę stylu przyjętego w powieści Atlas chmur Davida Mitchella, która to powieść składa się z sześciu stylistycznie niezależnych historii powiązanych w całość subtelnymi połączeniami. Przyjrzenie się stylizacji tekstu na dziennik, serię listów, reporterski dreszczowiec, wspomnienia, wywiad w konwencji science‑fiction i opowieść ustną pozwala przedstawić strategie użyte w tłumaczeniu powieści i scharakteryzować czynniki decydujące o stylu, takie jak gatunek, czas historyczny, postaci i inne.

Black Swan Green (2006) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), the two novels by David Mitchell that take up the genre of autobiography, also feature a set of illustrations. The interplay between text and image serves a variety of purposes: it anchors Mitchell's fiction in history, fuels the narratives and opens up onto a rich visual intertextuality, drawing inspiration from Japanese aesthetics. It also challenges the reader by constantly redefining the definitions of fake and fact, through a series of rewritings, transpositions and fabrications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though David Mitchell's novelCloud Atlaswas only published in 2004, critics have already written a number of articles and book chapters about this work. The complex structure and numerous ideas Mitchell explores lend themselves to viewing the novel through a variety of critical lenses, leading to more articles than one might expect on a novel less than a decade old. Thus far, though, people have been writing on subjects such as the novel's comments on environmentalism, genetics, or cloning, while others focus on Mitchell's view of history. Whenever the novel's structure is discussed, critics spend most of their time identifying Mitchell's literary inspirations or discussing the story-within-story structure as little more than a postmodern trick. However, Mitchell uses metafiction and intertextuality differently than those who have come before him, using such devices as a way of forcing the reader to consider the importance of narrative in one's life and in the world, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Mitchell’s number9dream (2001) has been received as a ‘postmodern Bildungsroman’ that redefines the coming-of-age narrative through a postmodern frame. Useful as this definition may be in distinguishing Mitchell’s novel from the traditional coming-of-age tale, most readings building on the notion of his fiction as ‘postmodern’ have tended to misconstrue or underestimate important aspects of his art. In this article I argue this point using the theories of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, and Brian McHale. Taking my cue from McHale’s understanding of postmodernist aesthetics hitherto not applied to number9dream, I analyze the novel from the point of view of its ‘ontological’ (as opposed to ‘epistemological’) dominant, defined here as the way in which number9dream prioritizes questions about the ‘being’ of its protagonist’s world over those of how this world can be ‘known’. Crucial in this context is fantasy, which Mitchell understands not as an escapist mode but, akin to Lacan and Žižek, as reality’s ‘support’. Rather than being subordinated to the ‘reality principle’, fantasy acts in number9dream as a driving and transforming agent in the protagonist’s progress toward maturity: a process that entails the realization that the world he inhabits, rather than being ever-present, always emerges through his own ‘fantasmatic’ activities.

Drawing on world-systems analytic perspectives and development studies, this article argues for the emergence of an experimental world epic during our era of global capitalist transition. As represented by David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, among other fictions, this epic demonstrates a radical commitment to global justice through its multi-scalar efforts to reconstitute the histories and horizons of world development, both for the subjects it represents and the global readership it addresses. For Mitchell, an ambivalent aesthetics of global cannibalism serves as a way to encode, critique, and exceed the logic of unfettered global capitalist accumulation, especially as the text self-consciously problematizes its role as a "global cannibal" of world culture and status as a commodity fiction to be consumed in the global literary marketplace. While the aesthetics of cannibalism may be distinctive to Mitchell, this article proposes that the experimental world epic might generally be characterized by its radical commitment to interrogating pivotal moments in world development and global transformation. Such an epic mobilizes world cultural knowledge and global literacies to highlight the deprivations associated with uneven development, enact global cognitive justice, and involve readers as active participants in articulating more ethical horizons for global transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two of his novels, Cloud Atlas (2006) and The Bone Clocks (2014), British author David Mitchell introduced apocalyptical worlds situated either just before the catastrophe or sometime after. Islands such as Ireland, Iceland, Hawaii and England feature prominently in those stories, where they spell out both entrapment and refuge; together they build up an archipelago of interconnected narratives and symbols. I wish here, following Deleuze's account of desert islands and Sloterdijk's analysis of spheres to study the specific psychogeography of those extreme islands, focusing on their value as experimental space and as mirrors of the self. Drawing upon the numerous echoes between Mitchell's fiction and A Jangada de Pedra by Jose Saramago, we will also explore their status as untethered locations, aloof from continents and their peculiar relation to history. Time cracks up on those islands where chronology is disrupted, where nostalgia for the origins is rife and myths are revisited. Iconic exploratory travels such as James Cook's fated journey into the Pacific are one essential reference but Mitchell also integrated the point of view of indigenous islanders into his narratives, counterbalancing the colonial approach and suggesting apocalypse may not be the end of the road. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), with a particular focus on history and narrative time. It seeks to offer an alternative perspective on the multiple and intertwined fictional narratives of Mitchell’s oeuvre as these evidence a move past the "post-" of postmodernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Mitchell'sCloud Atlas(2004) approaches the tradition of apocalyptic writing from a unique angle in that it refuses to submit to the linearity of temporal developments. Drawing on postcolonialism, environmentalism, and technological disasters, Mitchell implies that the kind of apocalypse traditionally envisioned as an event to be encountered in the future is already taking place. His novel casts any historical present as fundamentally marked by catastrophic developments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Miedzy Oryginalem a Przekladem is the property of Ksiegarnia Akademicka Sp. zo.o and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The unprecedented spread of globalization has led to thematic developments in contemporary British literature and the emergence of authors who reveal a new cultural identity for the post-millennium. David Mitchell'sCloud Atlas(2004. London: Sceptre) andGhostwritten([1999] 2000.London:Sceptre) question humanity's progress and capacity for ethical practices in a globalized world, blurring several literary genres so as to act as anticipatory allegories for the accelerating present. Mitchell suggests communal association and socio-cultural engagement are now necessities, in order to face the challenges of an increasingly interdependent planet which has transnational connections. And yet, ties are not merely forged between transnational individuals, but also between humans and clones across temporal and spatial divides, creating a pragmatic and realizabletrans-human future for all. Mitchell's globe-trotting narratives will be shown to offer a new planetary form and structure to reflect the convergence culture of the twenty-first century, with the transnational narrative strands coalescing to form a ‘macro-novel’ of communal interconnection, interaction and co-operation, offering an escape from the ‘broken history’ of the past. This article will therefore examine and identify how cosmopolitan ideals in twenty-first century literature offer a tentative optimism in the face of a fragile and uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miscelánea: A Journal of English & American Studies is the property of Miscelanea: A Journal of English & American Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper focuses on the language of the two science-fiction stories among the six stories that comprise Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas. "An Orison of Sonmi~451" and "Sloosha's Crossin'an' Ev'rythin' After", renamed 'Sonmi' and 'Sloosha' here for greater convenience. We aim at studying the extent to which the two craftily-carved languages, which are radically different both syntactically and semantically, give birth to completely opposed worlds. The highly-engineered language of the 22nd century in 'Sonmi' creates the image of a plentiful consumer society whereas the mutilated words in 'Sloosha' mirror a humanity which is only the shadow of its former self after the explosion of the atomic bomb. Yet, in keeping with the image of Deleuze's rhizome, the apparently diminished language of the middle story (Sloosha) seems to germinate again, finding its source in what is most natural and essential, while the other language actually produces an arborescent-like hierarchical society, leaving no space for imagination to grow. In Cloud Atlas Mitchell plays on intertextuality, his own distortion of the linguistic medium recalling other linguistic utopias such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.

David Mitchell's debut novel Ghostwritten (1999) not only depicts a globalized world; its peculiar formal organization also embodies the mode of relatedness that characterizes globalization. This article shows that the invisible, decentralized power that defines globalization can be understood as what Michel Foucault called biopower. As a “novel of globalization,” Mitchell's novel lays bare the hidden historical and theoretical affinities between the novel genre on the one hand and biopower on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Taking as its starting point the philosopher Stanley Cavell's brief reflections on Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse" and writing as self-understanding, self-concealment and madness - and as its founding image Cary Grant speaking of love alone in a sidecar in I Was a Male War Bride - this paper considers the relation between totality and incompleteness in the short story, focusing in particular on the incompletion of desire as a way of discussing the formal issues involved. If the modernist short story is so often thought of as an emblem of formal closure (the single gesture or unitary narrative shape), it often deals with notions of interruption and nonpresence, and with a certain madness created by the inability to account for the other. The paper considers two classic modernist stories of incomplete desire - Joyce's "The Dead" and Katherine Mansfield's "The Stranger" - and compares them to two sets of postmodern short stories, the "chain stories" of the English writer David Mitchell and the stories of the American David Foster Wallace (in particular the title story of Oblivion), exploring the proposition that in the contemporary stories incompleteness is displaced from identity to the narrative in which the self is ostensibly located, radically changing the form itself. That suggestion can, finally, be related to the changed cultural position of the form within the publishing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Mitchell is one of Britain's foremost contemporary writers who is only just becoming the subject of academic attention. Focusing on his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), this essay argues that the science of complexity provides a language with which to account for the novel's complex interconnecting structure. The novel is defined as an autopoietic system according to the theories of Maturana and Varela and its engagement with the issues of causality and time explored in relation to the work of Ilya Prigogine. The essay concludes that Ghostwritten is a complex narrative system that responds to the intimate connection between the macroscopic and the microscopic in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]